Gareth and Catherine Bull won more than £40m in 2012 - but they've barely
spent a penny and still shop in Aldi

The first person Catherine and Gareth Bull told about their £40.6 million lottery win in January 2012 was their sons’ headmistress. ‘We didn’t know at that point if we wanted to go public but from that first minute the boys were our priority,’ Catherine says. ‘We knew they would want everything to be the same. So we went to see her to talk it through first.’

The Bulls are, as they quite cheerfully admit, two of the most boring multimillionaires you could ever meet. Since the headmistress assured them that Joel and Declan – then aged 10 and eight – would be treated the same as other children they have remained committed to keeping everything as ‘normal as possible’.

The weekend they won they took Joel and Declan (who didn’t yet know) to their separate football games, nipping off down the other end of the pitch to ring each other and scream down the phone. They had a sleepover planned that night for Declan’s birthday, and on the Monday morning they went into school to tell the headmistress.

When they told the boys, neither asked for anything then, or have since, ‘other than the usual, I want 15 chocolate bars when they’ve just had one, but nothing big. They mirror us,’ Gareth, 43, says. Now aged 13 and 11, both boys go to the comprehensive school at the end of the road with their friends. ‘Joel’s in year nine and his grades are excellent,’ Catherine, 37, says. ‘I think that’s because he’s happy and confident there, which he might not be if he were moved to a private school.’ The couple would love one of the boys to go to university (Gareth and Catherine did not) but they insist they are not pushing them to do so.

After the Bulls did decide to go public at the end of the first week – ‘Otherwise we’d be living a lie,’ Gareth says – the headmistress gave an assembly about their lottery win. ‘Then they incorporated it into a maths lesson to teach the kids about the value of money,’ Catherine says.

At the post-win press conference Catherine said all she wanted was a new carpet for the landing and to get her hair done more than twice a year (‘Oh, I regret saying that now,’ she says, cringing). They didn’t want to move house – Gareth, who owned a construction firm, had just finished building their six-bedroom home in the small village of Mansfield Woodhouse, Nottinghamshire. And the landing carpet aside, nothing else has been upgraded at home. ‘We were in our dream home before, so we thought, why change it?’ Catherine says. ‘We have an immense amount of pride knowing that Gareth built this.’

Inside, it is spotless – hardly any possessions are on show, except for large flatscreen televisions in the kitchen, lounge and snug, where there are also some of the boys’ Xbox games (‘They save up for and buy those themselves,’ Gareth says). Catherine says she now has a lady to come and do ironing once a week, ‘but I still do the cleaning and washing up’.

Both continued to work, but after three weeks Catherine handed in her notice at the private health insurance provider where she had worked for four years as an adviser. Gareth had recently taken on an apprentice, so kept his business going for another 18 months – ‘until the lad was through; he’s a qualified bricklayer now’ – before winding it down. ‘That was one of the biggest decisions we’ve had to make,’ Catherine says. ‘We’ve always been hard workers; when you change your life like that you have to find a new structure. It takes a while to adjust.’

Gareth and Catherine at the press conference to announce their win in 2012

Family is evidently at the heart of every decision the Bulls have made, and quitting work has, they say, improved their lives the most. ‘Rather than getting up at 6am to put the slow cooker on for tea that night, rushing to get the packed lunches sorted and shooting off for work myself, we all sit and have breakfast together,’ Catherine says. ‘Then the boys get home from school and we try to have tea together. But don’t get me wrong,’ she adds, smiling, ‘we’re like every other family – conversations with teenagers aren’t always the best.’

Both Catherine and Gareth were brought up to be financially prudent – they grew up locally in the former mining area in ‘three-bed semis, like everyone else’; their parents worked, and both Catherine and Gareth worked from the age of 16. They met ‘locally’ 18 years ago, and have been married for six years. Before the win they would worry about where the money for the next bill would come from; Gareth would ‘constantly turn lights off around the house and turn down the heating’. (The first thing they did when they found out they had won was turn the heating up, only to turn it back down because they were too hot.) Even now they continue to be careful with their money, spending it very slowly. They did buy an iPad that they had been saving up for. ‘We took the money out of our account to pay for it and I was so scared,’ Catherine says. ‘What if it was all a joke?’ Two months later they bought a Range Rover for Gareth, then a sporty Mercedes for Catherine, and finally an eight-seater Hyundai to drive the boys to and from football matches with their friends. ‘I’ve been CRB checked so I can do school trips now too; it’s really nice, I don’t feel like the guilty working mother any more,’ she says. They gave their parents and siblings – they have two each – an amount of money that they don’t want to reveal but that is evidently generous ‘to do what they wanted with, no pressure from us’. Catherine’s mother has bought a house opposite theirs; Gareth’s parents now go abroad so much ‘that we hardly see them’, he jokes.

Gareth’s biggest extravagance has been a box at Wembley, for England games (if the family can’t make a game they donate the box to charity), and one that seats 16 at Old Trafford (Gareth doesn’t say, but these cost £125,000 per annum plus VAT). He goes to every Manchester United home game, taking the boys and friends with him. After meeting a couple on holiday, Gareth invited the husband to a match. ‘We hadn’t told him about our win, even after spending 10 days together, but when he turned up at Man U he had some questions,’ Gareth says.

Catherine still gets a weekly delivery from Tesco (free-range chicken comes from Aldi) and buys her own clothes on the high street – ‘I’ve moved on from clothes from Asda and Tesco; now I might shop in River Island or Coast.’ She has treated herself to ‘a couple’ of Mulberry handbags – ‘that was naughty’ – and keeps thinking about ‘those shoes with red bottoms’, but can’t quite bring herself to spend more than £400 on a pair of Christian Louboutins.

Gareth is wearing a Lacoste T-shirt, but he clearly isn’t vain; the photographer has to suggest he changes out of his jogging bottoms and Catherine out of her fluffy slippers for their portrait. The boys’ clothes are from Primark – ‘What’s the point in spending money when they trash it’ – although Joel is starting to care more about labels, ‘like all his friends’, Catherine adds quickly.

The boys don’t get pocket money, but Joel has a job, dressing up at children’s parties for £20 a day. ‘He’s very proud of the money he earns,’ Catherine says. ‘We pay for school uniform and football kit and say if he wants the other things then he has to pay for them.’ Declan, who used to tell his father off for wasting money on lottery tickets, was excited when he won a £5 voucher at school the other week, for obtaining the most achievement points in his year.

They have upgraded their holidays. They still go to a Haven holiday park twice a year but now they also go abroad frequently, including to Mexico last year, and they have a trip planned to Disneyland in April. They have also bought a holiday villa in Tenerife that sleeps 18. ‘It’s our first major purchase and that went through last week. We took our time researching it,’ Gareth says. ‘And I think we got the best exchange rate,’ he adds, laughing.

They donate to charity, but don’t want to say how much. ‘We like to do it anonymously.’ But a large amount of their lives now is spent volunteering at the local sports and social club, Debdale Park Sports & Recreational Club, where Joel and Declan play football and all the Bulls’ friends go on a Friday night (their friends, they say, wanted to know what it felt like to win, but then interest in them and their money died down). After quitting her job Catherine took on the role of the club’s steward. ‘I’m up there all the time – I was there emptying the bins on Sunday and sweeping up all the cigarette ends. But we always used to go up and have a drink with friends anyway – now I can be cashing up the till at the same time.’ Gareth does bits of construction work for the centre, a slightly rundown building in the village’s former pit mine – ‘It needs time more than cash,’ Catherine says.

Money, they insist, hasn’t changed them either as a couple or as a family. ‘We were boring before and we’re boring now,’ Gareth says with a grin. ‘There’s a load of ex-winners who are better out there than us – that Mickey Carroll, I read at the weekend that he’s back working now, driving a forklift. I’m sure he’s got better stories than us about how he spent it.’ The money has eased some pressures – the gas bill – and introduced new ones such as managing their investments. But overall, Catherine says, ‘our lives haven’t changed. The win has just given us a lot more choices.’